At the British Newspaper Archive, we have started to digitize international newspapers from the British Library. These rich titles explore the story of the British Commonwealth, from the time when the sun didn’t set on the British Empire through to states gaining their independence. At times, the subject of the newspapers brings us face to face with the stark and sometimes inhuman reality of colonialism and the legacy of the British Empire across the world. Below we will explore some …
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If you’re interested in the history of Yorkshire, you’ve come to the right place. The Archive currently holds over 70 titles from ‘God’s Own County.’ From Barnsley to Batley, from Ilkley to Keighley, from Sheffield to Wakefield, The Archive has 76 historic Yorkshire newspapers all available to search, which works out at being over 300,000 pages in all. These newspapers range from those that cover the entire county (like the Yorkshire Evening Post), to those with a more regional focus (take for example, …
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Here on The Archive we have a special collection of country and rural pursuits titles, numbering over 400,000 pages and covering the years 1849 to 1970. These titles range from the specialist – for example the wonderful Fishing Gazette, which focuses, rather unsurprisingly, on fishing in all its forms – to the more general, such as the ‘Country Gentleman’s Newspaper’ Field, which reports on a range of different country pursuits such as farming, shooting and fishing. We have a strong …
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Using newspapers for your Scottish genealogy research Do you find yourself daunted at the prospect of researching your Scottish ancestors? Keep the heid! There exists a fantastic array of records that can get you further along in your family history research. The main problem, however, is access. Much of what exists has not been ditigised, and for those that have been, many are not indexed. It is overwhelming figuring out where to search and what records, if they were created, survive …
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Anyone starting to research their Irish heritage has heard the story: ‘all of their records were destroyed in 1922’. The destruction of the Four Courts on 30 June 1922, which housed the public records office, was a huge loss… but! with digitisation, Irish family history is getting easier by the day. Sites like our sister site Findmypast are opening up new avenues of research by digitising a wide variety of sources, and many of their Irish collections are free! Newspapers …
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Exploring Welsh newspapers Here on The British Newspaper Archive, we hold 71 Welsh newspapers. With an ever-growing collection, it is useful to periodically check our titles page to see what has been added. To assist in this, you can narrow your newspaper title search by country, allowing you to quickly see what papers are available for a given country: This nifty feature allows you to narrow your search to just the historic newspapers from Wales (or Ireland, Scotland, or England). This …
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One of the features of The British Newspaper Archive is the OCR editing tool. This allows every user to contribute to the improvement of The Archive. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition– the process we use to transform millions of digitised images into searchable text. The computer takes an image of the page and then turns each line into text. However, as many of us have encountered, the text is not always correct and needs improvement. As a group, we …
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The British Newspaper Archive holds over 70,000 pages from Liverpool newspapers (and counting), making it an unrivalled resource when it comes to tracing the history of the city and its surrounding areas. Register to View Liverpool Newspapers Our clever search tools allow you to focus your search by looking at papers from Liverpool only and offer the ability to narrow by date, recent additions and more. To focus in on Liverpool titles only, while …
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The British Newspaper Archive is an unrivalled resource when it comes to tracing local history. Where else would you find millions of forgotten stories from your street, town or city all documented and ready to be discovered? Take Birmingham for example. The Archive contains over 50,000 pages and and a varied range of titles from the UK’s ‘Second City’ and this guide will show you how to make the most of them. Register now and view Birmingham newspapers for FREE You can …
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History was once dominated by ‘great men’ and ‘great battles’. Today we can tell a far more nuanced story about the impact of warfare on nations and communities. Newspapers can help to tell that story. The papers in The Archive stretch back to the early 1700s and into the 2000s and can be used to research many famous, and forgotten, conflicts. Throughout November we will explore a variety of topics related to the history of conflict and the military services. The …